Pros:

Cons:

A Game Of Dwarves sounds a lot like some of the other dwarf games out there, but though it shares the theme of building an underground base, it's nothing like the famously dense Dwarf Fortress. Nor is it Dwarfs?!?, last year's superb little arcade strategy game. Instead, A Game Of Dwarves is a close relative of Dungeon Keeper, Bullfrog's much-loved 1997 real-time base-building game, sharing the goals of doing research, building traps, leveling minions, and exploring underground. Unlike Dungeon Keeper, success in A Game Of Dwarves ended up feeling more like I'd mastered exploiting the obvious quirks in its system than actually become a good player.

Dwarves are good game characters, in that they traditionally like four things: mining, gold, fighting, and crafting (and sometimes drinking).

Everything seems right initially. Dwarves are good game characters, in that they traditionally like four things: mining, gold, fighting, and crafting (and sometimes drinking). When you combine those things, and you've got yourself the foundations of a strategy game. The moment-to-moment gameplay of digging for resources while building infrastructure and managing dwarves' classes maintains my attention quite well. Fighting monsters is largely automated, but building a force of berserkers and musketeers is quite satisfying. Meanwhile, the campaign offers a lot of content, with over a dozen one- to three-hour scenarios, in addition to a sandbox mode.

That length is a double-edged sword: sure, you can play for a long time, especially given its budget-level pricing, but the campaign drags as it progresses, making it harder and harder to avoid spotting flaws as you play.

Less Than The Sum Of Its Parts

The critical issue is that A Game Of Dwarves' mechanics don't combine in consistent, interesting, and challenging fashions, resulting in confusion at first and easy exploitation later. This manifests most apparently in how it deals inconsistently with space and time. Some mechanics, like combat and growing food, are entirely dependent on placing things appropriately with others, like moving items or distributing food, happen instantly no matter how big your base is.

For example, there's a happiness meter which controls how quickly you spawn new dwarves. If you want to improve happiness, you have improve your cave's aesthetics with things like statues, improved floors and walls, artwork, or barrels of mead. It's not a bad concept, but here's where it runs into trouble: items that take up space, like statues, require a crafter dwarf to come and build them, but floors and walls appear instantly where you place them. Those items increase happiness by improving aesthetics no matter where you put them -- a pile of statues in an unused cellar is as effective as a beautifully arranged, symmetrical throne room.

When placement doesn't matter, clutter is inevitable.

A Game Of Dwarves does nothing to discourage sloppy, apathetic play.

This confusion pervades the entire game. When half of the tasks you wish to accomplish require figuring out how long they'll take and how best to accomplish them, but the other half are instant, taking the easy way out is appealing. A Game Of Dwarves does nothing to discourage sloppy, apathetic play. In fact, thanks to instant teleportation of any item, and only slightly delayed teleportation of any dwarf, the in-game meaning of location is reduced to simply how long it takes you to scroll the map to where you want to be.

Creepy Bugs, Crawly Exploits

Another example: before you assign new dwarves into a class they're called dwarflings, and they gain experience automatically over time as opposed to dwarves with assigned classes, who need to do their jobs to improve. So if your food supply is stable, you can walk away from your PC for a few minutes and suddenly have massively more powerful dwarflings who can then be assigned classes at high level, rather than laboriously leveling them afterward. That's especially powerful for the military class, who otherwise require a lot of resources to level up.

Now that's a management game.

It was fascinating to see all the twists, turns, and corkscrews I'd used to get this far.

Another aspect that creates both joy and annoyance is the camera perspective perspective. You expand your base both vertically and horizontally through the mountain, and as I got further and further into a scenario it was fascinating to see all the twists, turns, and corkscrews I'd used to get this far, as well as how they can be connected for further efficiency. On the other hand, controlling both the camera and the digging process feels like more work than the three dimensions are worth, especially as I was learning the basics. This is made worse by a consistent bug where simply moving the mouse occasionally makes the camera inexplicably jump up or down several levels.

As I discovered that the best and sometimes only way to succeed at it was to play in a fashion that negated what made it fun, the initial charm of A Game Of Dwarves and urge to get lost in building a great base, exploring caves, and managing my resources all too quickly gave way to boredom. In the end, one of the many cluttered rooms serves as a metaphor for the whole experience: sure, all the stuff in there works, and it serves a purpose, but a little more elegance could have made the whole remarkable.

Sigh. First Kalypso's Dungeons, now this? Why can't someone build a Dungeon Keeper successor that actually works? I think the most recent game of this style that got my lair-building juices flowing was Evil Genius -- how about you?